ITA program: 20 years and counting

The figures roll off their tongues as easily as a cell phone number or zip code. And, for graduate students like Wenjing Zhang and Naga Sai Suman Moparthy, they are arguably more important to their campus identity. Both Zhang and Moparthy are international teaching assistants (ITAs). And numbers like 50, 263 and 268, which they rattle off with broad smiles on their faces, refer to scores on the SPEAK and UDIA tests, two hurdles all ITAs must surmount in order to conduct a class or lab on campus.

The two are among 70 international graduate students who underwent four weeks of training in spoken English, pedagogy and classroom culture this summer to prepare them as teaching assistants. The training program is run by the English Language Institute and funded by the Office of the Provost. Scores on the two rigorous tests, which measure spoken English proficiency and teaching skills, determine what level of contact ITAs may have with undergraduate students––from leading their own class, to heading a discussion section or lab, to just grading papers.

	A drama-based exercises help potential international teaching assistants express themselves more freely and clearly in English.

The ITA training requirement has been in place since 1986, said Dr. Scott Stevens. Acting director of ELI at the time and part of the team who prepared the training proposal, Stevens recalled how, nationwide, undergraduate students were up in arms over the new influx of international teaching assistants, who back then were being thrown into classrooms with no preparation.

“As luck would have it, a group of UD students with petition in hand had arrived at then President Trabant’s office just hours after ELI’s proposal to create an ITA training program had landed on his desk. The program was immediately approved.”

Currently, 868 of the 3,446 graduate students at the university are foreign nationals, with 50 percent of applications to the graduate school coming from outside the United States. During the fall semester, 515 graduate students were serving as teaching assistants in various departments across campus, said Mary Martin, assistant provost for graduate studies.

Teaching assistants who are American citizens must undergo a training program run by the Center for Teaching Effectiveness. In addition, some academic departments run their own training programs for their teaching assistants, said Martin.

“The university takes very seriously the use of TAs working with undergraduate students,” she said. It is perhaps a no-brainer that a graduate student who has never taught a class before would need some preparation before facing a roomful of undergraduates. Less obvious are the cultural aspects of the American classroom which need to be explicitly taught to TAs from other cultures.

“I couldn’t believe it, but it turned out to be accurate,” said Snezana Nikolic of Serbia, who was a teaching assistant in the linguistics department in 2005.

“The ITA pedagogy class was very informative,” she said. “In Europe we have a very different system. There is a different relationship between students and professors. Here, undergraduates are like paying customers. You have to pay extra attention to what you say, to your tone of voice.”

“I learned a lot,” echoes Zhang, a first-year graduate student in the food and resource economics department from Shanghai, China. Zhang teaches a 200-level statistics discussion section.

Despite feeling nervous her first few weeks in class, Zhang knew from her training in Ken Hyde’s culture and pedagogy class that she had to move around and get close to students, something teachers in China do not do. She also learned how to handle student questions.

“When students ask a question, first I have to clarify it, then answer, then ask, ‘Do you understand?’” she said, adding that in China students do not ask questions, preferring to figure things out by themselves.

“Here the relation between teachers and students is more like friends,” she added.

Zhang shared that after her ITA training her score on the UDIA test climbed to 268. A score of 250 is required to handle a lab or discussion section for non-majors.

On average, international students improve more than 50 points on the UDIA, said Hyde, who helps coordinate the program. In order to ensure progress, students are videotaped teaching a mock eight-minute lesson each week, and then they review each tape with their teacher. The final tape is evaluated by a panel of instructors.

Oral intelligibility––the ability to be understood ––is the second focus of the ITA training program. This class was particularly useful to Moparthy, a doctoral student in the physics and astronomy department. Moparthy had taught physics before in English. But that was to undergraduates at Acharya Nagarjuna University in Andhrapradesh, India, where he received his master’s degree. There, he says, there was a big difference: If students didn’t understand him, he could always explain the lesson in Telegu, his native tongue.

Now in his first year at UD, Moparthy no longer has a second language to fall back on with students in his Physics 207 lab. Fortunately, he was able to improve his oral English, with his score on the SPEAK test jumping from 32 to 50.

“I improved my accent a lot because of Sandy Nickel’s oral intelligibility class,” he said. “She used storytelling, drama, skits––it was a type of fun and also a way of knowing English very practically. I was able to remove my fears, to feel free, without tension.

“Now when students come with doubts about experiments, I feel more confident.”

The English Language Institute employs a dramabased approach to teaching certain speech features, such as intonation, rhythm, stress and projection, as well as nonverbal features of communication, such as gestures and proxemics.

“ITAs learn to see teaching as the ultimate performance,” said Dr. Scott Stevens, one of the originators of ELI’s drama-based approach. “Drama also fuses culture to speech. And to the extent that ITAs can be students of the American university culture and imitators of it, they will find greater acceptance with their own students.”

On average, graduate students who undergo oral intelligibility training improve their scores on the SPEAK test about five points, with many improving 10 points or more, said Joe Matterer, program coordinator. A score of 50 (out of 60) is required to teach a laboratory or discussion section, 55 to teach a class as “instructor of record.” About 85 percent of all international graduate students undergoing the ITA program qualify for some type of classroom contact with undergraduates. Additional pronunciation tutoring is offered by ELI in the fall semester to those needing it.

Following the 2006 summer ITA program, new international graduate students were assigned as teaching assistants to 18 academic programs across the university.

“The ITA program does a good job preparing newly arrived students to use English in their day-to-day activities and acquainting them with the way American institutions go about teaching students,” said Professor Eugene Mueller, former director of graduate studies in the chemistry department.

Professor Ken Lewis, director of graduate studies in the economics department, agrees.

“The program is very effective,” he said.